“I really believed in it,” Ryan Murphy, director of the HBO movie, told the mag. “[Writer] Larry [Kramer] set a very high price. I gulped and said, ‘Okay,’ and bought it. I think he wanted to see, ‘Is this kid serious?’ And I was.”

“It’s such a rich, important, cool part of American culture,” Mark said. “It’s as cool as the hippies; it’s as cool as the civil rights movement. It has its heroes. It has its f—ing drama.”